A former supervisor with the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto has admitted that Jeffrey Baldwin’s grandmother “was part of a team” that was deciding the little boy’s future and ultimately sent him to the hands of his killers.

Marina Sweet, long retired from the agency, was testifying Tuesday at the Ontario coroner’s inquest into Jeffrey’s death.

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Ms. Sweet left the CCAS 12 years ago, so her memory for details has suffered, but she was a frank, no-nonsense witness.

In part because of how the grandmother, Elva Bottineau, had inveigled herself into favour with CCAS staff, she was never subjected to internal agency or criminal records checks.

Yet at the same time, as Ms. Sweet later told lawyer Philip Abbink, who represents Jeffrey’s surviving siblings, even people just inquiring about becoming foster parents, for instance, or who were volunteering with the agency, had to go through internal and/or police checks.

“Because we knew this family,” Ms. Sweet said at one point, “it coloured what we did, I think.”

In the result, Bottineau’s criminal conviction in the 1969 death of her own first baby and her husband Norman Kidman’s convictions for assaulting two of her other youngsters in 1978 went undiscovered.

All this information — and more sobering details, in particular about Bottineau’s potential dangerousness to children — was in CCAS files.

Yet because Bottineau had come to be seen as an ally and, ironically, “as a strength,” the agency instead supported or facilitated the transfer of Jeffrey and three of his siblings — all the children of Bottineau and Kidman’s daughter Yvonne and her boyfriend Richard Baldwin — to the grandparents’ care.

“Elva was part of a team looking after this young family,” Ms. Sweet told coroner’s counsel Jill Witkin.

“Part of your team?” Ms. Witkin asked.

“Yes,” said Ms. Sweet.

“And her opinion would carry weight?” Ms. Witkin said.

“I think so,” Ms. Sweet agreed.

A veteran with 34 years in child welfare, she was the supervisor of frontline worker Margarita Quintana for several years, but most importantly, at two critical junctures when, had anyone done the records check, Jeffrey might have been saved.

One such opportunity came when Yvonne and Richard had their fourth child in the summer of 1998.

Because the young couple was then living north of Toronto, it was the York Region Children’s Aid Society that was responsible for the new baby.

Its interim head George Leck wrote the then-CCAS boss Colin Maloney on July 28 that year, asking the CCAS to do “a home study” on the Bottineau-Kidman home.

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The York agency emphasized it wanted to “ensure Ms. Bottineau’s home is an appropriate, safe home for a youngster” and that she had the “means available to care for a fourth young child.”

It was, as Mr. Abbink said, a perfect opportunity for the CCAS to put Bottineau’s name through the hoops, and would have been “a pretty easy” decision and not requiring an onerous effort.

“Yes,” Ms. Sweet agreed.

Yet she couldn’t even be sure that Ms. Quintana had actually gone to the house, she said. “I just know she attended that house regularly.”

The “home study” is a thin document, filled with Ms. Quintana’s usual characterization of Bottineau and Kidman as the towers of strength. She flatly recommended the new baby go to them.

The other huge missed chance came in the fall of 2000, just two years before Jeffrey died.

The CCAS was then in chaos, with frontline workers on a strike and supervisors like Ms. Sweet and other managers stepping in.

A curious complaint, made first to the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, made its way to the CCAS.

A man named Benjamin from Iowa claimed to have been chatting online with Yvette Kidman, who was then living with her parents and her sister’s brood of youngsters.

Benjamin called because, he said, Yvette claimed to have been sexually and physically abused by her father, Kidman, and told Benjamin two of the four children were at risk.

A supervisor from the CAS apparently went out to the home.

Family photo

The CCAS, Ms. Sweet said, mistakenly ran a records check on the grandmother for what appears to have been the first, last and only time — but did so under the name of Elva Kidman, though she was well-known to many at the agency as Elva Bottineau.

As a result, all that came back were the files for Yvonne Kidman’s kids.

“As I knew the case,” Ms. Sweet said with trademark honesty, the other supervisor “probably relied on me…

“I wish we had done that records check. It would have changed the outcome entirely.”

It was a coulda-shoulda-woulda sort of day: Ms. Sweet readily and frequently agreed that it would have been prudent and simple for the CCAS to have run checks on Bottineau.

But, as she said once, “it’s hard for me to answer these questions because at the time, it [what we did] made sense.

“I keep hearing the end, the rest of this case” in her head, she said. “What could I have done differently. It’s almost a feeling of guilt that I didn’t do it.

“I feel very badly for what happened in this case, to Jeffrey,” she said.

She agreed with Mr. Abbink that the failure was more than a failure of agency policy but rather a failure of critical thinking.

Not yet six, Jeffrey died on Nov. 30, 2002, of septic shock and pneumonia in the grandparents’ east-end Toronto home.

But the underlying cause of death, the jurors have heard, was prolonged starvation, likely over years.

Bottineau and Kidman were convicted of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and of forcible confinement for how they kept the little boy and a sister in a locked, unheated bedroom-cum-prison, where they were forced to live in their own waste.

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